


Fixing Mistakes

by LadyAJ_13



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Episode 2x08, Episode Related, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 18:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21104342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAJ_13/pseuds/LadyAJ_13
Summary: Sam knows he did the right thing coming back, but just because he saved them doesn't mean he's forgiven. Time for a talk with the Guv.





	Fixing Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> Rediscovered an old love this week and despite completely confusing myself by watching the episodes in the wrong order, came up with this. Hope someone likes it!

Sam swings round, legs staggering from the force, and crashes into the filing cabinet. Funny. He’d thought he’d be a little safer from the manhandling when Gene had a recent gunshot wound to the leg.

“Right.” Gene’s dropped one of his crutches to leave himself a hand free, and after letting him crash to a stop, it wraps itself once more in Sam’s collar, shaking him roughly. “Explain.”

Sam gapes. How to explain… this?

“I’m sorry,” he starts. It’s the truth, but it doesn’t feel like enough. He betrayed them all. He got Gene – and Ray – shot. He traumatised Chris and Annie. And the reason why… it’ll land him in the loony bin.

“Try again, Sammy.”

Gene is actually shaking, he realises. It might be from pain, straight from hospital to the nick, then the exertion of collaring Sam and shoving him about – but he’d be willing to bet at least part of it is sheer fury.

Oh God. He might actually have to try the truth.

“It’ll sound ridiculous.”

“You always do, Tyler, why start making sense now.” Gene leans heavily on his desk and reaches behind him for a bottle. He takes a swig straight from it, screwing the cap back on again after pointedly; no sharing here.

What is there left to lose? Apart from his job, but there’s no way the Guv will keep him here now anyway. He could go to Hyde, maybe, try and make it in a different precinct, but the idea of working for Morgan tastes like bile in the back of his throat.

He's got no choice. He has to try.

The whole story comes spilling out into the silence. From the early days, telling Annie she’s not real, right through the voices and Frank Morgan and cancer, to back in 2006, boredom, Nelson’s words ringing in his ears, and finally a swan dive, that left him back there, in that tunnel, gun in hand. That had him shooting to kill.

He’s shaking himself by the time he’s finished, shadows of adrenaline from the shooting, maybe, or the very real possibility that he’s just ruined everything he came back for. He stares at his hands, falling into the visitor chair and gripping his thighs – to still the movement, or to wipe away the sick, cold sweat on his palms.

“You’re mad as a hatter.”

He looks up. Gene looks back steadily, with no hint of expression.

“Yeah,” he scrubs a hand over his face. “Probably. Sorry. Thought I – thought I had a handle on it all but-“ he cuts himself off with a shrug. He doesn’t know what’s real any more. He knows what he chose, but maybe he chose a fantasy. A life of coma. Maybe he didn’t. It would take a very good psychiatrist to make sense of the tangled mess of his mind right now, and those don’t exist in the seventies. Or not for coppers, anyway. Maybe if he was a rich man.

“And you have been since day one.”

He chuckles quietly. “Yeah.”

Gene sighs. “Well that explains a lot, Samantha.” The bottle is nudged to the edge of the desk, and Sam reaches for it, hesitantly. Gene stares at the ceiling as he takes a cautious swig. The whisky burns, as always, although he’s used enough to the alcohol intake by now to appreciate its smoothness. He’d tried the same brand in 2006 one night; looking for a lost time, a familiarity he’d been surprised to miss. It had tasted like petrol.

“Okay.” Gene slaps his good thigh and stands up. Sam scrambles for the abandoned crutch and holds it out. “Way I see it is. You’re off your bloody rocker good and proper. But you’re also – when you’re not sending your friends up the _sodding river_ – a decent copper. Despite being cockadoodledoo you’re somehow still more use to me than Chris, or half the other men in that room.” He jabs a finger at the currently empty office.

“So… I’m not fired then?”

Gene grabs him by the collar again, hauling him up out of the chair and peers closely into his face. “I think you’ve got bloody work to do before you’re turned loose, or there won’t be a department to come back to. Didn’t you say you gave Morgan some damn evidence?”

“You want me to get it back?”

“Ding ding ding, we have a winner. There’s a brain floating around in that head after all.” To ram the point home, he knocks knuckles on Sam’s skull before pushing him away. “Get it back and we’ll say no more about it.”

Sam stares, as Gene settles himself behind his desk, looking as if he has every intention of staying where he is – despite the leg wound, and despite the hour. “Really?”

“If I fired every copper who made a mistake I’d be running this place with me, myself and I. And maybe we’d get more done, but then one of us would also have to make the tea.” Sam laughs.

“But I’m-“

“Mad?”

“Well, yeah.”

“We’re all mad here. Have to be, to spend your days running down scum. Maybe it helps.”

He shakes his head, remembering the corny mug his office mate used to keep on his desk – _You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps_. Who’d have thought Gene Hunt would be the word-smith behind it? “You should go home. With that leg. I can give you a lift.”

“You’ve got things to be getting on with, DI Tyler,” Gene spits, but it’s all play-acting, he can tell. He’s not sure how, but it seems he’s been forgiven. As if it really is that easy. “And I’ve got a god-awful amount of paperwork to dispose of, preferably without your disapproving eyes all over me bitching about filing in triplicate and paper trails making the sun shine out of your arse.” He glares upwards. “I thought I’d given you your orders?”

Sam smiles, and heads to the door, pausing with one hand on the door frame. “Yes, Guv.”

“And when you’re done with that-“ He runs out before Gene can finish, grabbing his jacket from his desk and hotfooting it to the lift. “It’s your round!” he hears bellowed down the corridor, just as the doors close.

He grins. Time to fix his mistakes.


End file.
